REPORTER AT LARGE consisting of reminiscences brought on when the writer looks out of his office window to W. 43 St. He sees the Hotel Dixie where his favorite writer, Col. John R. Stingo lives. When the writer met him in 1946 he was 72. Nearby is the Hotel Strand, where, as a young reporter, the writer interviewed a man who wore an electric shirt front advertising a brand of cigars. The Woodstock Hotel reminds him of Jack Willis whose public name is William Hamby. He is an astrologo-nutritionist, yogoist, poet & former prizefighter. The Paramount Theatre building recalls a 1931 interview with actress Pola Negri. Col. Stingo today says he is 91, or two years older than the writer's calculations. For 30 years he wrote a column "Yea Verily", for a Sundays-only paper the N.Y. "Enquirer" & its successor the "National Enquirer". Writer recalls meeting the Colonel a few years ago, then going back to the Dixie with him. Tells about his misconceptions about the hotel which were set right by the proprietor, Mr. Hyman B. Cantor.

THAT WAS N. Y. about author's childhood which he spent on the West Side, and about his having fallen under the spel of a newspaper serial entitled "The Last New Yorkers," which ran in the Evening Mail back in 1912. The story begins in 2712. The last two survivors of the white race, Beatrice Kendrick and Allan Stern, opened their eyes agai after eight centuries of suspended animation. It was on the 48th floor of the Metropolitan Life Tower that they had survived after the rest of civilized humankind had been wiped out by an unspecified blight, and it was from this tower that they looked upon the uninhabited city -or so they thought for while, until the cannibals came. Tell about other features that appeared in the Evening Mail & about newspapers that existed at that time.

The evidence of the eye is hard to disbelieve but easy to forget. Last September, I sat in Comiskey Park, in Chicago, and saw Charles (Sonny) Liston win the heavyweight boxing championship of the world from Floyd Patterson by knocking him out in two minutes and six seconds. I wrote then, “It was like one of those saloon fights that end abruptly because the chance combatants are not in the same class.” I noted that Liston, the considerably bigger man, was so much the stronger that he was able to pull an arm free in a clinch and hit with it, and that since he was at least as fast as Patterson, these advantages made his victory inevitable. “The winning punches were like those a man might use to beat the resistance out of a boy in a street fight,” I wrote.

Historical parallel to the Profumo-Christine Keeler case that of Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke (1776-1852), the mistress c Frederick Augustus, 2nd son of George III, Duke of York, & Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the latter equivalent in those days of the post that Mr. Profumo held in the present British Government. Frederick was also a Biship of Osnabruck, in Germany, a title he had acquired before he bacame a soldier. Also he was married. He did not give his mistress an allowance…but instead let her have a monopoly on the sale of new commissions in the Army: 2600 pounds for a full Majority, 1500 for a Captaincy. In 1809 An Opposition backbencher, Col. Gwillym Wardle, brought chanrges in the House against the Duke for trafficking in commissions, & there was a scandal that rocked the Realm & the Government, the latter headed by Prime Minister Spencer Perceval. Tells about the Parliamentary investigation & the Duke's acquittal on his promise to resignas Commander-in-Chief. Mrs. Clarke, instead of selling the Duke letters for publication, as Miss Christine Keeler has done with Mr. Profumo's, got 7000 quid down and 400 a year for life from the Duke for not publishing them. Mrs. Clarke, according to the biographical notes in the back of Coles' edition of Cobbett's "Rural Rides," was "probably the daughter of a man named Thompson, & according to herself, married Clarke, a stonemason, in 1794, subsequently she became an actress before hooking up with the Duke …

WAYWARD PRESS about the N.Y.C. newspaper strike, which lasted from Dec. 8 to Mar. 31, especially the story of it by A.H. Raskin in the "Times". Raskin recounted it, but not as the agent for either party, & the writer feels that the "Times" earns the highest marks for letting him go his way. Negotiators for both the Publishers' Association and the union dawdled from last July until the strike began, four months later, never coming to grips with their differences. The two leaders in the dispute were: Bertram Powers, head of the N.Y. local of the International Typographical Union & Amory H. Bradford, head of the publishers' negotiating committee & vice-president & general manager of the "Times". Writer traces the negotiations step by step. Credit for final settlement goes to Mayor Wagner and his two advisers: Theodore H. Kheel, labor expert, and Harry Van Arsdale, Jr., the city's AFLCIO chief. Others who entered the negotiations briefly were; Gov. Rockefeller, Pierre Salinger, Sec. of Labor, W. Willard Wirtz. The peace did not satisfy either side – it was a peace of exhaustion. The strikers received a "package" valued at $12.63 a week instead of the publishers' proposal of $9.20.